Transfer of Meaning

The vast Prora hotel, with its 11,000 rooms, was built on the island of Rügen to help hammer the individuality out of Germans. Now it's a haven for eccentrics and refuseniks, writes William Cook

Sunday August 12, 2001- The Observer

What do the world's cutest car and the world's biggest hotel have in common? They were both built by Strength Through Joy, Nazi Germany's answer to Butlins. When Hitler died, his little car and his great big hotel went their separate ways. The Strength Through Joy car was reborn as the lovable Volkswagen Beetle. The Strength Through Joy hotel vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Half a century later, VW is a byword for hippy cool and yuppie chic, but whatever happened to the giant holiday camp that shared the Beetle's maiden name?

Seebad Prora straddles the shore of a broad, sandy bay on the beautiful Baltic island of Rügen. Rügen is in Germany, but only just. The Polish border is a short drive away and Scandinavia is far closer than Bavaria. It feels far closer, too. However, when the Nazis chose Prora as the site of the biggest holiday camp the world had ever seen, they built a road-and-rail bridge between Rügen and the mainland, bringing this futuristic hotel within four hours of Hamburg or Berlin.

Locals call Prora the Colossus, and when you first catch sight of it, through the thick forest that now surrounds it, you can see why. A lifetime after its construction (1936-1939), its sheer size still takes your breath away. Six storeys high, it stretches along this windswept coastline for nearly three miles, in one enormous, unending arc. It takes an hour to walk from one end to the other. It can only be photographed in its entirety from the air.

This immense monolith is so large it scarcely seems manmade at all, more like a concrete cliff, some freak tectonic mutation of the natural landscape. Close up, it consists of more than 11,000 rooms in total, built for 20,000 holidaymakers, linked by a dozen corridors, each more than a mile long. And almost all of this Third Reich relic is still intact.

Prora was built by the German Labour Front, Hitler's Keynesian answer to mass unemployment, to provide rejuvenating package holidays for the German working class. The site included a cinema, a school and a hospital, plus a huge jetty that still juts out into the sea, where Strength Through Joy cruise ships would dock, en route to the Canaries. Each double bedroom had central heating, en suite wash basins and, above all, a wonderful sea view. Billy Butlin, eat your heart out.

After the war, Rügen ended up in the Russian sector and Prora became a top-secret army base, a virtual university of warfare, where Warsaw Pact troops rehearsed for a Third World War. The holiday camp that Hitler built became a hi-tech military training camp, where Soviet soldiers played wargames to prepare for the apocalypse to come. Out of bounds to locals, Prora disap peared from East German maps. A wild wood grew up around it, hiding it from the sea. Today, Prora's camouflage is complete. You can stroll for miles along the beach, only a few hundred feet away, and never know it's there.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the soldiers left and Prora became an awkward historical curio, and I'm sure I wasn't the first foreigner to wonder why the Bundesrepublik didn't demolish it. But I'm glad they didn't and believe it would be a great shame if they ever do.

First, it's actually rather fascistic to obliterate every architectural trace of a previous, vanquished regime. The Third Reich was an historical era. Uniquely awful, but unique none the less. Prora is the largest remaining monument to the worst of times, the flip- side of the Final Solution. Second, in the vacuum that the collapse of communism left behind, something really rather wonderful has happened to this sin ister but spectacular white elephant. Designed to hammer the individuality out of German workers, and reduce every individual to a tiny, identical cog in a titanic war machine, Prora has become a haven for eccentrics and refuseniks, an ad-hoc ghetto of intimate museums.

There's an exhibition about the holiday camp, which doesn't flinch from fascism's atrocities, and a matter-of-fact display about the barracks that replaced it. There's a railway museum and a science museum, plus exhibits of local social and natural history. There's a secondhand bookshop that sells defunct communist textbooks and East German army bric-a-brac, and an avant- garde art collective which runs its own studio and gallery. Just as the art gallery built by Albert Speer in Munich to glorify Aryan art is now an important space for the very artworks the Nazis sought to destroy, so Prora has been colonised by precisely the type of people the Nazis would have persecuted. It's a corner of beatnik Berlin in the heart of rural Prussia.

And what a corner. Rügen is a magical island, free from the post-industrial eyesores that blight much of the East German mainland. And although Prora is an extraordinary place, for most tourists, it's just one of Rügen's attractions. The Baltic is warmer and calmer than the North Sea and in summertime it's positively balmy. Like the Med, it's almost tideless, more like a lake than an ocean. The beaches are fine white sand and dark copses creep right down to the water. Inland, the forest fades into an eiderdown of fields and meadows, broken up by erratic lakes and inlets. Birds of prey hover overhead, and the tree-lined avenues are remarkably free from traffic.

Arriving in this oasis feels less like travelling from West to East, more like travelling back in time. And there's no shortage of visitors. West Germans are rediscovering an island that was off-limits for a generation and, despite their newfound freedom, East Germans still choose to come here. Nearby Binz is a handsome seaside resort, a riot of fin-de-siècle architecture, full of informal restaurants and family-friendly hotels. Further north, the national park of Jasmund is a woodland paradise, bordered by dramatic chalk cliffs, immortalised in the romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. On Rügen's deserted west coast, it feels like the twentieth century never happened.

Nobody seems sure what the future holds for Prora. Only a small part of the site is ruined and the remainder contains enough rooms to house thousands of alternative artists or booksellers. Various plans, including turning it into holiday apartments, have been mooted, but the current favourite is to turn it into an international university. It's only an idea but given Rügen's historic links with Sweden and Denmark, it seems especially apt. After all, before the Cold War, the Baltic was a northern Mediterranean, a maritime superhighway of free trade and free thinking, and the fiercely independent Hanseatic ports that surrounded it were never narrowly nationalistic.

And, best of all, an old East German soldier told me as we walked along the endless corridors, such a cosmopolitan solution would surely have Hitler revolving in his grave.

William Cook travelled to Rügen with Lufthansa (0845 773 7747) and Deutsche Bahn and stayed at the Seehotel Binz Therme.

Getting there: Lufthansa flies daily to Berlin from London City Airport, and to Hamburg from London Heathrow and Stansted. Return fares start at £103 to Berlin and £74 to Hamburg.

Onwards by rail: return fares from Berlin or Hamburg to Binz (journey time about four hours from both) start at £13. Deutsche Bahn Booking Centre 0870 243 5363.

Accommodation: double rooms at the Seehotel Binz Therme (00 49 383 9360) range from £53 in winter to £93 in summer per night, including breakfast.

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